Was absolutely humbled several months ago to interview Munaf Rayani, guitarist for Explosions In The Sky, about their latest album, Take Care, Take Care, Take Care. This man was one of the most eloquent people I’ve ever had the fortune of interviewing, and I got off the phone feeling thoroughly enriched. Beautiful, just like the band’s wordless, but amazingly affecting, music. The album is out now on Spunk, and we can only cross our fingers that a tour might follow.

What are you up to at the moment?

We just got home a few days ago from doing a couple shows out west in California. We just did a couple of opening slots for the Arcade Fire. We’re taking off tomorrow morning to head over to Europe.

That’s incredible! How were those shows?

With the Arcade Fire? It was amazing, I think it was a great match and it usually makes for some of the best shows when there’s two bands that aren’t, you know, anything alike but hopefully offer a strong sound and a strong show. To double up on that I think makes for a great show. We felt very lucky that we got the opportunity to play with them.

Your songs are very intricate. How do you usually begin the writing process?

Right, well usually we start with one of us will work out a melody in our room and make sure that whoever is writing it is into it and then we present it to each other and if everybody’s liking from then we’ll expand on it, but a lot of times you can bring a melody to the table and you might get ‘oh I dunno, I’m not into it’ and it gets lost in the shuffle. It’s all very working together and hashing out melodies and working around different parts and seeing what we can do, but definitely a collective effort.

So how long does a song normally take?

I think the quickest we’ve ever written a song is two weeks and the longest we’ve taken to write a song has been two years, so it can just vary anywhere in there, you know. It’s just about patching the certain stride. There are times when we are so hyper critical of what it is we’re trying to write that it’s hard for anything to get through, so whatever does get through is only the best.

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I first saw sleepmakeswaves a few years back at the Excelsior (rest in peace, buddy) and was blown away by their ferocious live show and passion. Last week they finally released their debut album, …and so we destroyed everything, and it’s everything I could have hoped for – a perfect mix of insightful post rock and massive riffs. I’ll have a review of that up soon enough, but before that, I had a chat with bassist/synth player Alex Wilson and guitarist Jonathan Khor ahead of their show at Tone on Thursday.

So how’s everything going?

J: Yeah, pretty good, we just put the album out for pre-order today and picked it up, was it yesterday?

A: Yep.

J: Picked it up from the printing thing and sent out all of the promo stuff to sort of radio stations and street press and all that kind of thing, and we’re about to go out on tour next week so I suppose it’s been pretty busy.

How busy has this year been in terms of tours?

A: We’ve mainly spent the last few months just focusing on this album, and all the stuff that goes into doing that. We recorded it in February and since then we haven’t actually played a whole lot, we’ve got this hardcore stretch of rehearsal that we’re about to do before we head out on tour again. But one of our guys went overseas, so we’ve had to record the album, mix the album, get the artwork together, all that kind of stuff to do. We’ve been laying low and hoping to come back in a bigger way than before, I suppose.

How far back does the process for this album go?

A: Some of the songs have actually been kicking around for some years. I think one of the songs on the record, we would’ve written back in 2009 or something like that, just after our last release, and some of them, there’s probably two songs we’ve never played before that we’ll be doing in the set, but some of the stuff people will be hearing they would’ve heard us earlier in the year playing that maybe in a modified form.

J: All the stuff on the album’s never been recorded before, so we’re stoked to finally be able to put it out on a record. They’re the kind of songs that maybe our hardcore fans that come to a lot of shows have known about them for a while, but for most people it’ll all seem pretty new, I think.

A: Yeah, I was just thinking about it a couple of days ago and I remember the first time I talked to our producer about doing this record it would be the end of 2009, I would’ve started playing the demos then and we were recording demos all throughout 2010, making sure that the record, making sure all the songs were good and we knew them, and just really going hard and trying to do it right.

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On the back of their second album Keep Calm, Carry The Monkey, Mark Lang – frontman of Melbournites Skipping Girl Vinegar – jumped on the phone for a chat. The album is a fantastic one, full of quirks and surprises, and is out now on MGM.

How has the response to the album been so far?

It’s been amazing, yeah. We don’t really know, we just kind of work away and put it out and yeah, it’s been overwhelming actually, the response we’ve been getting about it all. The media has been particularly full on about it and it’s starting to happen around the country as well, it’s being reviewed. It’s been great.

What are the differences between the making of this album and your last?

Well our first record we made over four years, we took a long time making it or writing it, particularly, and then making it. I guess no one knew who we were then so we just kind of worked at it as we could, and then this one I guess we had the pressure of trying to make it in a month touring and there’s sort of expectations and pressure to try and get something out reasonably after the last one, not that we did that quickly. All of that. But we sort of repeated the same idea that we kind of recorded in unconventional spaces, like we were going to record along the coastline and in a beach house and things like that. So that was similar, but the actual process of recording was quite different.

On the first album, it was an album where we were growing up and working out what we were doing and we sort of developed the sound of Skipping Girl Vinegar, and then on this particular album we really wanted to sort of push the boundaries and sort of come at it from a different angle. So we deconstructed everything we did from the instruments that we used right through to the way in which we played them and building things up – so for example with the drums and stuff, we started by using sort of conventional kits and then it sounded a bit vanilla so we found this old marching drum in a dumpster and it’s sort of become a bit of a theme that we’d start using sort of recycled or discarded instruments and there’s just all this kind of life and character in this old kick drum. It rattled and it was sort of imperfect, and all those kind of things that I sort of love about old things. And then we’d do things like get a huge group of our friends together and smash garbage cans…bash on benches and things like that, and kind of construct kits and rhythmical patterns around those kinds of things. We took that idea or feeling to everything, from the way we played the guitars to everything.

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I had the distinct pleasure of interviewing US singer/songwriter Joshua Radin for the second time ahead of his show at the Enmore on Tuesday 21 June. His latest album, The Rock And The Tide, has just seen local release in Australia through Warner.

Hello, how are you?

I’m well thanks, how are you?

Not too bad thanks. Are you having time off from playing right now?

I’m actually off right now because I had my tonsils taken out. So I’m having some bed rest and vocal rest, and the next time I tour is going to be down in Australia.

So getting to the record – how did using live, rather than session, musicians work out for you?

I think it went really well. I mean, there’s a couple of songs on the record that have studio musicians but for the most part it was recorded live, and it was just so much more fun.

And the recording process?

It’s sort of whenever I have time to record or off the road, it’s never like a set thing. It’s sort of haphazard, so when I’m off the road I do some recording and writing and then I go back on the road and it’s not like a typical thing where I do a record and then I tour the world and then I go back and do another record, because the records keep coming out in different countries at different times, so I’m always trying to play catch up.

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megastick fanfare is one of my latest loves. I will admit that I had not heard their music before about a month ago, when my boss slung me a copy of their Jonathan Boulet-mixed debut album, grit aglow. LOVE AT FIRST LISTEN! There is a definite Animal Collective-esque vibe but not in a way that makes them derivative or boring, and the record is so varied – it swims around a lot of different moods and sounds, but manages to remain cohesive. Really good stuff. ‘POW’ has 80 iTunes plays on my computer at the moment and I’ve got it on right now so I guess make that 81?

I also caught them live on Thursday night at FBi Social with The Parking Lot Experiments and Sealion and it seems that the music translates just as well live. Heaps of energy, very focused but not to the point of rigidity. Wonderful, wonderful, very wonderful.

A few weeks ago I sat down for a cafe chat with Sam Goldsmith and Adam Zwi, who are both keyboardists/drummers in megastick fanfare. They are an absolutely delightful pair and we had quite a lovely slice of afternoon together, before I had to head back to work anyway, talking about their music and just random general fun stuff. Transcript of the former after the jump.

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Gold Coasters Bleeding Knees Club have had a hell of a year. Alex Wall and Jordan Malane had, up until a year ago, not played much music, but they got together spontaneously for a warehouse show and have kicked out the jams since, pulling hints from their favourite bands to make Virginity, their lo-fi debut EP which splashes messy, youthful energy into songs barely two minutes long (you can stream the whole thing on the band’s Bandcamp page).

They’re about to go overseas to record their debut album with Dev Hynes (Lightspeed Champion) and play their first international festival and club dates, but before they do that they play FBi Social on Saturday with Dead Farmers and Step-Panther – I can’t make it but I wish I could, so you should all get along to check out some quality music! Alex and I had a bit of a yarn over the phone one March evening about the excitement of being a band on the rise.

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I saw you just posted the video for your single Have Fun?

Yeah, we just released it. We sort of sat down and brainstormed with the guy who directed and filmed it. It’s just kind of what we do anyway, we hang around. We filmed it like, two weeks ago, it was just one day.

You’ve been playing together for a year, but you’ve known each other for longer, right?

Yeah, we’ve been friends since we were like one year old or something like that. Yeah, we met at a day care sort of centre. We’re both 21.

Before you started making music, had it crossed your minds at all?

Oh no, not at all. We both played a little bit of guitar but not really, and then Jordan got a drum kit one day and then we just started playing I guess, just randomly. We played at an art show one night and I guess that was it.

How did you start to write songs?

At the start we were just making random songs, and then when we started to get shows we started writing songs actually that were songs, not just noise. I kind of write it all myself at my house, and then me and Jordan will jam on it and add some little bits here and there.

In a year you’ve gone up really fast and things have happened quickly – some bands try for years and that doesn’t happen. How’d it happen so fast for you guys?

I have no idea, I don’t really know how it happened. We just put our demos up on triple j Unearthed and they kind of liked it, but I really have no idea.

Are you planning to make this your career now?

I went to uni, I’ve finished uni and stuff, not that that helps now. We’re gonna do the shows and ride it out, if it’s still going good. It’s really good, it’s better than sitting at home and doing nothing or working at McDonalds or stuff like that. It’s pretty fun, we enjoy it.

In the last few months you’ve done your first few international supports. Do you get nervous?

I don’t think we really get nervous any more. The Wavves tour was kind of nerve-wracking, that was like really big crowds every night and we like their music as well so it was kind of scary what they would think of us. But I don’t know, you kind of get used to it after a while.

The sound you’re making has come back in recently (Wavves, Girls etc) – what drew you to that?

We both used to listen to that music, I guess, that’s the kind of music we listen to and we were listening to it and thought it could sort of be entertaining to do. I really like that sort of genre of music and stuff.

How did you keep that lo-fi sound in the studio?

We recorded mainly live… We recorded in a home-made studio with one of our friends recording us.

Did you write the songs on your EP to group them all together, or just separately?

‘Camp Out’ was one of the first songs we ever wrote together when we first started, we weren’t really planning on doing an EP. We wrote two songs for the demo that we did and then we got enough songs to do an EP so we sort of just decided to do an EP. We’re going to record an album in May overseas, so we have a few songs, a whole album’s worth of other songs, I guess. They’re sort of all just teenage having fun sort of songs, I don’t know how to say it. They all have the same storylines to them, they’re all about girls and guys having fun.

I heard you named your EP after the fact that your manager lost his the night before recording began…

We thought he lost his virginity and then we found out the other week that he lied about it. He’s still a virgin. He’s not our manager any more, but the guy that was managing us is still a virgin so the EP is kind of a lie!

Have Fun was used on a Myer TV campaign. How did that come about?

They just emailed us and asked us if they could use our song, and we thought it’d be a good idea at the time.

Most bands don’t interact much with the internationals they support and yet here you guys are, having Lightspeed Champion produce your upcoming album. How did that conversation strike up?

Well, we really didn’t even talk to Lightspeed Champion much when we were touring with him. He told our manager that he really liked our band, and our manager asked him if he’d like to produce it and he was pretty excited about the idea, so we just sort of organised it and stuff. We haven’t really spoken to him much.

What’s the current progress with the upcoming album?

We’ve kind of demoed the whole album, so we’ve got a rough recording of the whole album at the moment, but we’re still writing a few new songs to put on it that haven’t been demoed and stuff. I guess I’ll write some songs in the meantime are better than other songs are. Yeah, it’s the same sort of vibe as the EP, I think. There’s a few slow songs as well.

Since you’re entering a proper studio this time, do you plan to keep the lo-fi/DIY ethics of the EP? Are you worried that might be compromised?

I think we’ll still record in a pretty rough sort of setting and stuff, but we’ll just record it live so I don’t think our sound will change that much, though I kind of want it to be a little bit of an improvement from the last recording. Just sort of progressing a little. I think the songs are a little more structured better than the EP, the EP was pretty badly recorded, I reckon, so it could be a tiny bit better but it still won’t be some pop clean album or somethng like that.

You’re about to go overseas not only to record, but also to play your first international dates. People over there don’t have triple j and they might not know you. Excited? Nervous?

It’s the first time we’ll be overseas as a band, it’s really exciting. We’re trying to get some bloggers and stuff to write about us, hopefully we’ll have a few fans over there.

Lots of young bands have crazy tour stories. What are some of yours?

Weird stories… I don’t know. Weird things always happen, I can’t think. Adelaide’s pretty weird, it’s a weird place. The whole place is just weird, I don’t know, it’s like everyone just does what they wanna do there, there’s no groups of people, everyone’s just like…weird. I don’t know any weird stories. When we toured with Yacht Club DJs, we went to R&B Superclub and broke everything, I think. I can’t remember. Maybe leave that question!

Sydney band Underlapper has recently released its third album, Softly Harboured. It’s an interesting mix of genres and sounds, with guest appearances from Parades and a healthy dose of strings. The band launched the album last week at the new FBi Radio venue in Kings Cross, and I caught up with guitarist, bassist, synth player, pianist and vocalist – a lot, I know! – Greg Stone a couple of days prior.

You can download their four-track single mix, Drinking Dust, for free here.

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Can you tell me a bit about the album?

I guess a lot of it, well probably half of it anyway, was written while we were touring the previous album, so I guess that stuff on the album tends to sound more I guess like our live shows. I think that definitely came through a lot, but then when we actually finally went in to record those tracks, we started writing the rest of the album and then those last lot of tracks tend to be more electronic based, I guess more similar to what we were doing on the older albums. So I think there was definitely a distinct two halves in the album itself, but as is always the case with us, six people, it always tends to be jumping all over the place. I don’t think we could ever really stick to one thing.

The sounds on the album are all quite different. Is there a common thread tying it all together?

I don’t think there was really a reason, it’s just there’s so many of us and we all listen to such a wide variety of music and I guess the only real tie is I guess we all sort of take influences in, a whole lot of stuff, and the stuff that comes out sort of has an aesthetic to it, whether it’s the actual structure, the band structure, what instruments we use, or whether it’s just the way the song’s written. Even though it does jump all over the place, I think there is sort of a thread that ties it together.

Do you write songs together or separately?

Usually someone will have an idea and then they’ll bring it to the group and then everyone sort of writes their own individual parts. Someone might bring something to the table that’s fairly well structured already and other times it’s purely just an idea, and then we make it together and just jam and see what happens. It certainly comes up, I guess the majority of us also do other things with other projects so I guess we each have other outlets where we can maybe focus on something ourselves, so I guess that gives us something to do outside of Underlapper, but with six people you’re always going to have a difference of opinion, but I guess we’ve been together for a while now so everyone knows their place in the band and it’s a fairly democratic sort of thing.

How do you choose whether you want to sing something or if you want a vocalist coming in?

I think when we’ve written a song, it’s usually myself or one of the other guys, Morgan, that does the vocal, so I guess if either of us have a particular melody or something that we want to do on a track then we’ll definitely usually be the first one to do it, but I guess in particular with songs like the first song from the new album, we always have a female vocalist in mind for it. So I guess it’s just about thinking what the song actually needs, but I mean the third track where there’s sort of five people adding vocals to it, we were going for a choir section type feel so we all had that in mind, that we were going to bring in a few people for that one.

How about recreating those songs live?

The ones where we’ve got some female guests doing lead vocals, we probably won’t be doing them at this stage but definitely down the track we’d like to play them so we’ll get them to come and do their part. But as far as the other ones go, the songs were sort of pre-written before the recording so we sort of had a way that we played them live and then sort of wanted to flesh the sound out more on the actual recording, so we’ll pretty much just go back to how we used to play it, but if there’s people there that were on the album we’ll definitely get them up for a thing if they want.

So are they friends you already knew?

There’s a couple of guys from Parades who we’ve known for a while, who we remix and stuff and played shows with them and stuff, and they always liked the song that we asked them to sing on so they were keen to come along, and a couple of the girls were from this a cappella group that they no longer do any more but they were actually friends with the drummer, so when we wanted to get a couple of people in we sort of approached them, and there’s just a couple of friends in there as well that we knew.

In terms of the strings on the album, do you leave those out live?

For the launch, Peter Hollo who did the cello parts is actually going to play for us, which is really good, but outside of that show we’ll probably just get other instruments to play those lines, I think.

Generally how would you say your music translates live?

I think the more band type songs, like I guess with the live drumming and that sort of thing, I think they translate fairly similarly, as they are on the album. The more electronic based ones, whilst they’re still based around loops when we play them live we might add a few other instrument lines over the top of them. But I guess in general they’re still fairly true to the album, but they might have a bit more of a life, they might be a bit fuller in sound.

In your 10 years together, what do you think has changed and stayed the same?

I guess it’s always about influences, really I think. Particularly going back when we first started, the first album definitely had that sort of experimental hip hop vibe and that was something as a group we were really into at the time and interested in creating because we didn’t feel like that was something that was happening in Australia. Then I guess the second album we were starting to move into that more folktronic post rock type thing. So I think it really is just the influences and what we’re interested in making as a group. I think we’re definitely not the sort of band that has a definite style or sound, so I think influences is probably just the biggest change for us and what we’re into at the time, really.

How about in terms of relating to each other and writing?

I guess that’s definitely changed over the years, when we first started it was definitely a sort of one and all type of thing. But with the new album it’s definitely been more I guess one or two people doing something and bringing it to the group as opposed to all of us, and it’s definitely as you get older I guess it’s harder to make time when everyone can get together, so it is more of an individual approach which is then translated onto the group.

You mentioned your side projects before – did they start before or after Underlapper and how have they influenced the band?

When that started it was definitely the same thing, it was sort of the first real group that we were all in. I mean we’d all done stuff when we were younger, but this was the first serious group we’d been in. For example, Morgan used to do a project called Morning Stalker and it was definitely more of an ambient guitar loop based thing and he definitely brought that sound to this new album. So I think you’re always sort of bringing your own personal influences into the actual sound of Underlapper.

Baltimore babes Beach House – Mr. Alex Scally and Ms. Victoria Legrand – charmed Sydney audiences last week with shows at Beck’s Bar and the City Recital Hall with their beautiful sounds. I caught up with Alex a while ago to talk about what was inspiring the band during the making of their latest album, Teen Dream. You can catch them next weekend at the Laneway festival.

Hello Alex, how and where are you? Are you touring right now?

I’m good, how are you? I’m in Baltimore. No, we’ve just finished kind of touring forever, it’s a kind of rest for a minute.

And how has touring been for Teen Dream?

It’s been constant – at times exciting, at times extremely exhausting, and it’s been everywhere. We’re done until Australia.

When you were writing this album, did you draw on your own teenage years?

No, I don’t think we did that at all. Rather than going into your memory and your past kind of vibe it’s more like a call to the future, to get re-invigorated with those feelings you used to have – not necessarily some kind of dumb high school relationship that was really dramatic, but more just like kind of unbridled excitement and passion and enthusiasm and wildness that you feel at that time in your life. I think it’s more like the songs are instilled with that… The name isn’t specific, it’s not a statement, it’s more an abstract thing that works as a feeling and in a certain way it felt really classic. I think we both were both similar – nerdy, church tutored a little bit, we both played music, both tried to follow the rules. I don’t know, we weren’t very exciting, I can say that. I think the process is always exactly the same. We’ve just been doing it longer together.

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Canadian mathematician turned experimental/electronic musician Dan Snaith, better known as Caribou, released a sonic mindblower last year in the form of Swim – a total departure from his earlier work and a wonderful mess of soundscapes. Ahead of his appearances in Sydney – at Playground Weekender and at the Metro with Four Tet on 17 February – we caught up to chat about the latest record.

Whereabouts are you right now and how has your year been?

We go on stage in Cologne in about 20 minutes. It’s been incredible, this whole year has just been overwhelming. It’s been an incredible year.

You’ve said that Swim was influenced by your new found love of water after you learned to swim recently. What was it that attracted you, and how did you emulate it?

It wasn’t even specifically being underwater, but having the elements in it, the dynamics of water. So in particular, synthesising sounds that kind of swell and decay in the way that a wave might, or move from one side of the stereo from left to right, a kind of fluid washing back and forth – things like that, they just turn back to the dynamics of water in the kinds of sounds that I use. There’s a lot of synthesised sounds, you’re kind of building them from the ground up, you have a choice of how to build the sounds so that’s where a lot of those decisions entered into it.

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Canadian MC Richard Terfry, better known as Buck 65, made his way to Australia back in September for some shows and I caught up with him ahead of them. Our chat actually leaked into email territory because he just had so much to say! The gigs have been and gone now, but in this interview – done back in July – he talks about his new project 20 Odd Years and two decades in the biz.

(Prefer full article format? Head to page 38 of the online edition of Drum Media #1026 to see my write up as it appeared in the magazine.)

How are you? Where in the wide world are you at the moment?

I’m fine thanks. I am in Toronto, I’m actually laying on my bed in my house right now.

Tell me a bit about your new album.

Well, the series I guess – we’ll call it a series, I don’t know what else to call it – it’s five EPs and we’re calling the series 20 Odd Years which is a reference to two things. It comes from a line of a song called ‘Gee Whiz’, which I recorded with a guy named Nick Thorburn from a band called Islands, but it also refers to the fact that this year is the 20th year since I basically made my debut, if you will. And so this year’s basically dedicated to that and we’re just spreading out all of this year’s activities, including the release of new music across the whole year. And so with the music itself, I basically wanted to create a bunch of music that was more melodic than anything I’d ever done before, and really the only word I had in my head before I recorded was “melody”. I wanted to dig a little deeper into that. And so I turned to a lot of my friends, especially vocalists, because it’s an area where I’m definitely very limited, but there were some things that I wanted to do in the songs so I guess one thread that really runs through all of it is that you hear a lot of other voices.

How did you decide how to divide the songs between EPs?

It’s really difficult to explain and it probably would only really make sense to me, but I can tell you that during the process I had a good handful of songs, I would say maybe 12 or 13 songs ready to go, and I knew that as the process was starting I would continue to make songs to set out the direction of the EPs. We were doing 4 songs per EP so that would mean 20 songs altogether. So even as I got started, I would continue to be recording new songs and as for what would go on each EP, to me that’s the most difficult decision to make and I really laboured over that for a long time. But I think basically the way that decision-making process worked was really more about keeping certain things separate more than wanting to group certain things together. So in my mind if there were two songs that had something in common, it meant that they had to be separated and as far apart as possible. So every time I saw songs that needed to be separated, I’d put them in different groups and somehow, through that demented process, the groups began to form on their own and I did a little bit of shuffling so that each one felt like a nice self-contained unit and had its individual strengths and so on, but it’s a pretty esoteric process, a real source of madness, I think.

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